openSUSE Admin: manage the complexity

In the Service Teamâ€™s Cave, where the infrastructure of openSUSE servers and services runs, the openSUSE Service Team faced an issue: requests to admin@opensuse.org were managed only by mail, making it hard to keep track of all the open issues and leading to coordination problems. As some requests to this list also contain log in credentials, the list itself could not have a public archive. This could have exposed sensitive data to the public. So it is always complicated telling people what’s going on there, and even more complicated, allowing interested people to subscribe. (Please note: including credentials in plain Emails is never ever a good idea – it is even not the intention of the Service Team to get such credentials. But sometimes people don’t care about their sensitive data, or just realize too late that their log files contain information that should not be visible).

But openSUSE – and especially the administration of all openSUSE services – is all about collaboration and communication. So hiding in a small cave might not be a good idea if you want to get some helping hands or reach out for collaboration.

Today we took one big step forward with our infrastructure by integrating admin@opensuse.org into the ticket system available at http://progress.opensuse.org/ ! At first this may not sound very interesting, but please remember that this service is already integrated into our authentication infrastructure. Now everyone with an openSUSE account is able to Â check the state of public tickets (warning: tickets are set to private per default), create new ones a have a look at other public modules of this “openSUSE admin”-project – or become part of the team.

Just to avoid confusion: sending an email to admin@opensuse.org is not only still possible but also the preferred way to reach us.

For coordination and to be “reachable” for all those guys hanging around at some IRC channel, we now also have a public channel on irc.freenode.net: #opensuse-admin Feel free to say hello, thank you, or ask us questions.

I’m sorry, but topic wise there is currently no relation between bugzilla.novell.com and progress.opensuse.org. bugzilla’s main task is to handle bugreports about packages/software related stuff around openSUSE. The main tasks of progress.opensuse.org are more (openSUSE) project related. So using progress everywhere does currently not make much sense.